


at his heels, a stone

by impatienscapensis



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: 1x07 Nepenthe, Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Suicide Attempt, heaps of it, let the episode be your warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:01:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23136607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impatienscapensis/pseuds/impatienscapensis
Summary: Agnes thinks about what she’s done, and what she’s about to do.Alternatively: Agnes is a synth. I’m calling it now.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14





	at his heels, a stone

**Author's Note:**

> I meant to finish this before the new episode came out, but eh. What can you do.

Agnes stares at the hypo materializing in the synthesis crate, her hands sticking to the cool, slightly tacky plastic of the infirmary table. 

_ Agnes, don’t be such a fucking coward.  _

Her stomach rolls again, and she bites her tongue and swallows her bile. She will not throw up.

_ Your fault. Your fault, you naïve, soft, stupid girl.  _

She holds the hypo in her hand and it feels like death and lukewarm plasti-metal alloy. 

_ Stupid girl. Stupid girl. Stupid girl.  _

She is aware on some level that this is a glitch in her programming, that she is impaired by the things that swarm in a paper wasp’s nest on the inside of her skull, but  _ fuck _ , she’s going to kill these people if she doesn’t go first. 

_ stupidgirlstupidgirlstupidgirl.  _

There is something so horrible about dying in this way. Something so grossly terrifying to her she wants never to look at it again. What a terrible corpse she’s going to be, spit-covered and tensed and bruised. 

_ stu-pid-girl. stu-pid-girl.  _

The syllables strike in time to the rock nailing her in the solar plexus, swinging back and hitting again, some sick Newton’s cradle of childhood trauma. 

_ What kind of sick sadist programs trauma into his androids?  _

The kind of sick sadist that made a sentient prototype to a hypothetical, experimental technology. The kind of sick sadist that  _ makes _ an anhedonistic sentient being and releases her into the world with no footing, no placehold. 

_ Curious, Maddox had said. You have never been happy? _

Agnes has tried. Fuck, she’s tried. She blew bubbles and went to concerts and vacationed in tropical regions. She ate cake and she did nice things for people and she smoked snakeleaf on an abandoned moon with a young green-haired woman and her older sister. 

_ Cake.  _

She can feel the wet, grainy texture lingering at the back of her throat, and she resists the urge to retch. 

_ I tried so hard, Maddox. I tried.  _

The first time she felt happiness, she hooked up an extra circuit board to herself. It was flimsy and weak and the fuses blew almost immediately, but it was  _ something.  _

_ But you were a goddamn asshole.  _

There is regret in her throat that she killed him, but she does not let it pass through her processors. She clings to her paper-thin happiness.

_ Breathe.  _

She releases the button on the hypospray. It burns under her skin for a moment. She winces, and when she opens her again, her mind and field of vision are foggy. 

_ Goodbye, Maddox. I hope to God we end up in different hells.  _

Her throat closes and she stumbles around the room, but she’s out of it before she hits the floor. 

-

When she dies, she dreams.

She dreams of Ophelia, drowning, quietly slipping under the cold of a bitter spring river, flowers in her arms. She feels the lightness of the freshwater and the way her hair floats around her head, the way her clothes tangle about her, the sunlight weaving through the clouds. 

She dreams of Portia, alone and unattended, hot coals searing her mouth and leaving a trail down her throat. She feels how unbearably hot the fireplace is, how unbearably hot her mouth is, her stomach, the untended wound on her thigh, and her saltwater tears don’t put it out. 

She dreams of Lady Macbeth, scrubbing her hands vigorously of Maddox’s blood, rubbing them raw. She feels the way it burns and she sanctifies herself under a cold tap, ripping the skin off her fingers and palms until nothing remains. 

-

When Agnes wakes, there is still water in her ears, coals in her stomach, and blood crusted into the folds of the skin around her fingernails. 


End file.
